Introduction

NP problem optimization comprises a large and important class of practical problems in science, engineering and business. While real domain problems (non-linear, differential, etc.) comprise a large domain of optimization problems, permutative problems command a higher difficulty rating since most are intractable.

The principle application for such problems can be seen in real life applications, like manufacturing floor design and planning, routing problems like vehicle, network data amongst others. Layout planning and design alongside large scale manufacturing system depend on optimization tools.

In this book we focus on multiples problems, such as combinatorial optimization problem, namely the Quadratic Assignment Problem, .. , etc.

• (QAP) is one of the most difficult NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, so, to practically solve the QAP one has to apply Meta-heuristic algorithms which find very high quality solutions in short computation time.